Mumble for iOS Beta Test: Phase 1

As promised some time ago, the beta test for Mumble for iOS-based devices has now gone live.

The portal for the beta testing efforts can be found at http://mumble-ios.appspot.com/. If you are interested in testing the application, please read on for more information on joining the beta test.

In the initial phase of beta testing we will let about 40 people into the beta. This is not a lot of people, but since the beta test is done using Apple’s ad-hoc distribution scheme, we’re limited to 100 unique devices for the beta test.

In its current state, the application works for just basic voice chat. It’s quite bare-bones at the moment, which is why we’re only letting a few people into the beta in the first phase of testing. The currently available version is 0.1, and while it works for basic voice chat, it lacks a lot of convenience features for navigating a server (switching channels easily, viewing comments, etc.), viewing log messages, sending and receiving text messages, and so on. These will all be implemented during the beta, and improved until they provide a good mobile interface for Mumble. A roadmap of the which features we prioritize will be available at a later point in the beta.

The beta test will initially only be for iPhone form-factor devices, not iPads. It’s too early to focus on the iPad form factor, since the phone app will still work on there, albeit upscaled. Once the feature set of the iOS client is more complete, we can begin looking at supporting iOS devices with other form factors.

Another thing to note is that the beta client will only work on iOS devices that run 4.0 or greater. This means that if you’re on an iPad with iOS 3.2, or an iPhone or iPod Touch running an old OS, you won’t be able to run it. If your device is running your beta application will be ignored.

We also request that developers who themselves are able to build and run the application on their devices do not sign up for the beta test. This is, again, because of the limited slots available for testers.

We hope you’re going to enjoy being able to Mumble on the go, and that you’re willing to help improve the experience of using Mumble on iOS devices in the beta test.

Last but not least, we want to remind you there are already Mumble clients available for other mobile platforms. The Mumble client for Android is available on GitHub, and the desktop version of Mumble runs on Maemo devices.

I too am curious why an open source development community would use apple’s extraordinarily locked-down development workflow. It is very easy to compile code using xcode that remains unencrypted for use on jailbroken devices and distributable via cydia. It would be a *great* way to open the beta program without “running out” of beta keys… you would also not have to customize the builds to specific uuids… apple’s whole iphone app testing workflow is pretty horrible.

Wow, all i have to say is all my buddies and myself are clamoring with excitement for this. The majority of us have iPhones and have been dying for some sort of remote access like this since our ventrilo days.

Now if only I could get into the beta testing :(. Do y ou have any sort of notification when additional slots might open up? I’d kill to be about to help!